Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Starting Monday morning at 04:00, and ending the next Monday at 03:59, I'm going to see how many hours of CodeCombat development I can do in one week. Not "hours at the office" (I work from home), not "hours on the computer doing productive things", but "hours on the computer developing CodeCombat". So I'll count things like writing code, building levels, writing documentation for said code and levels, etc., but not things like responding to CodeCombat emails or planning the business or meetings. I just won't do those things this week.

I spontaneously did a how-much-can-I-work week last year when I was deep into the Skritter iOS app and got 87.3 hours of general Skritter work. It was extremely fun, so I thought I'd do it again, but this time I've prepared for it. I've planned my meals, laid out my clothes, started waking up early, blocked email, bought an adjustable height sitting/standing desk, and readied other ridiculous preparations such as a stack of twenty bars of 90% dark chocolate.

I'm going to make a time lapse video of the whole week with no post-processing except for adding a music track. So if you're at all interested in seeing what it looks like to code this much, look for the video next Monday (or maybe Tuesday if I'm that tired afterward.) I adapted some open-source self-tracking software I wrote to serve as a time lapse heads-up-display dashboard thing that'll be more interesting to look at during the video than just my screen.

The time lapse will be fun for me and help keep me honest, since presumably at least a few people will watch the whole six minutes and would heckle me if I counted beastskills.com as work. I find it exhilarating to think about focusing deeply on code for a week with no distractions and overdosing on motivation to push deeper into the zone than I've ever gone before. (I hope that's what will happen.)

I intend for this to serve as my all-time record for hours really worked, so if you spot any loopholes that need clarification in advance, post a comment.

Also, if you want to guess how many hours I'll end up with (there are 168 hours in a week*), post a comment. Winner is closest-without-going-over. Choose a number before reading other comments.

* Note that unlike work-hour king Geoff Anders and other polyphasic warriors, I need to sleep around eight hours a night in order to function, although I'll try to only sleep six times instead of seven with 25.14-hour days.

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Question: Do you have a system for distinguishing time spent staring blankly at your flashing cursor daydreaming about sugarplumbs [sic]? For those who don't know where I'm going with this: http://messymatters.com/tagtime

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Read Next

Last week I set out to see how many hours of programming work I could do in one week on CodeCombat, our multiplayer programming game for learning how to code. I clocked in at 120.75 hours. Here's the epic time-lapse video I generated from Telepath (watch in 1440p if you can):

So what did I learn from this experiment?

Adjustable height desks are amazing.

I bought one from Ergo Depot a few days before. I must have switched between sitting and standing fifty times last week. I would never have survived otherwise.

I think there's a tremendous amount of misconceptions regarding achievement, productivity, creativity, ambition, work, work rate, work ethic, and so on.

So I'm thinking of publishing some analysis weekly with examples of what happened in the week, successes and failures, noteworthy events, what I'm reading and listening to, and so on. If it goes well, I can give you a picture of a workweek for me, intermix tactics and techniques, and give you practical guidance about what's working well and what isn't.